New software that could change the way we share books. Delicious Library enables you to re-create a virtual image of your old-media library. You can use a scanner to get your books loaded up, and you can also write reviews, help others buy the books, or even be open to lending them out to others. i will probably buy it and test it out. My greatest fear is that you guys will discover all my cool books and will be asking to borrow them. And I will then need to buy more software to track down which person has borrowed which book, and which nasty email message will be sent automatically to remind them. Dang. This could ruin our relationship! But it could also save us money if it would help us share our stuff more. Which is a good move.
A Delicious Library
WOW! I like this one.
Andrew, I just downloaded this yesterday. It immediately uploaded all the books I had already entered into a different library program. It is really amazing. The best thing about it is if you have an iSight camera it turns it into a bar-code scanner…very cool.
This looks similar to MediaChest, which is explicitly meant for the purpose of sharing DVDs, books, games and CDs. MediaChest lets you search for items within a certain distance from your location, making it a combination of social networking and file/media sharing using both the web and sneakernet.
BTW, for a cheap scanner that will read barcodes, check out the CueCat.
You don’t need a scanner or an isight. A normal dv camcorder with firewire will do the job. I checked it out. It’s so much fun. Just hold your book’s barcode in front of the camera and you have added an other book with every detail and the frontcover to your library.
And if one of your friends wants to borrow a book you just add the person from your mac adressbook to the programm and drag the book from the shelf ontu the icon of that person. That’s it. The programm will automaticly create an entry in your iCal to remind you in two weeks to ask the book back.
Btw. you can download the programm for free. But you can only add 25 items.
Thanks for your comments – very helpful
UPDATE: OK- I used the demo version and heres the skinny:
– Easier to use than I thought- my DV camera scanned it fine.
-Fails to recognize international ISDN numbers – less than half my books came out with images
– Does not work with my amazon associates number – good for Delicious who get a cut from every book they sell but not good for us unless we can put in our own numbers (which i dont think we can)
– Easy to share with Mac users
– No PC version – not now and probably never.
Verdict: Fine to play with but not worth buying.
That looks great! I had just been thinking about that exact thing over the last few things. I love to read but it gets expensive! There should be a way to share resources with each other–maybe this is it!
Drooling over a Delicious Library
Wow. It’s pretty. It’s functional. It’s pretty. (Did I mention their site is very pretty.) Now that both my brothers are on OS X and my parents considering a G5 iMac after the wedding, maybe we can do some serious…
Check out SmartCommons.org! Cross platform sharing (web application).
I just released it on Christmas. It is not Safari friendly yet, but is happy with Firefox, Netscape and IE.
Cheer!
dan